The rock: points of view in Bart De Clercqs painting

(2012)MEDIJSKI DIJALOZI.5(13-14).p.853-881 Mark abstract Images are of the order of monsters. They are beautiful in the same way that they are shocking to the eye. In Édouard Manet’s own words: “Un des plus beaux, des plus curieux, et des plus terribles spectacles que l’on puisse voir, c’est une course de taureaux. J’espère, à mon retour, mettre sur la toile l’aspect brillant, papillotant et en même temps dramatique de la corrida à laquelle j’ai assisté.” In the bullfighting occurring at the moment of looking at images (any image), the fight between the beholder’s eye and the painting’s gaze, in Lacan’s sense, is won by the latter. The toreros, the embodiment of modern warriors for the bourgeois spectators in the second half of the European XIX century, are always destined to symbolic death: the power of the (self-) annihilating gaze of the picture itself wins over the eye in the ritual of exchange between subjects and objects of looking, whose roles mingle, interchange and constantly shift during the realistic and also hallucinatory act of seeing images.

Please use this url to cite or link to this publication: http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-4443205